Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter by Diana Souhami (recommended books to read TXT) 📕

… The place is inviolably yours, the lanky, awkward, adorable you that wrote historical novels and had no sense of humour. You have changed more than I have, for I haven’t changed at all.

She would have benefited from a long stay there, away from the muddle she had made. But after a week she sailed with her mother and Sonia for the Baroness de Brienen’s house, Clingendaal, in The Hague. All the provocations returned. Denys was so ill he had been sent on ahead. He was to stay in a cottage on the estate. Violet was not to be out of her mother’s sight until Sonia was a bride.

On the Channel crossing Mrs Keppel appropriated Violet’s cabin saying she must not be disturbed. Violet shared with Sonia who snored. Vita wrote caustically that she supposed Denys would be waiting impatiently for her. In fact he went for a walk when he knew she was about to arrive, did not return until lunchtime and evinced no interest at seeing her. He took all meals except lunch alone in his cottage. Violet visited only once, when he was out, to borrow a book. He befriended a guest called Ruby who asked Mrs Keppel if Violet was going to divorce. Out riding, he lamed one horse and killed another ‘by making them jump impossible obstacles’.

He looked emaciated: ‘like a wraith, there is nothing of him’. Mrs Keppel tended to him. ‘She fusses far more about him than she has ever about anyone in her life.’ George continued to leave any room Violet entered and did not address a word to her. ‘In some extraordinary way he seems to think that I am responsible for D’s complaint.’ Sonia told Violet she could not help despising her both for missing Vita so much and for the way she had treated and continued to treat Denys.

Mrs Keppel took long solitary walks and could not, for a moment, be civil to Violet. ‘She is diabolical in her intuitions … She knows exactly what to say to hurt me.’ She was scathing to and about her in front of the guests. The atmosphere of the house was ghastly. Violet felt like a pariah. ‘Men Chinday displays the greatest ingenuity in finding fault with me. It amounts almost to genius.’ Daisy de Brienen took her cue from Mrs Keppel. Other guests were beloved Archie, the Alingtons, the Harry Lehrs, Lady de Trafford. In the evening they played bridge. Violet stayed alone. There were, she said, no temptations of any kind.

With her mother’s party she trailed the sights of Amsterdam and Gouda ‘trying to persuade myself that I liked stained glass’. She stayed in the grand hotels of Bruges and Brussels, Ypres and Antwerp, gambled her money, complained about the architecture, cathedrals, brassware, carillons, the Memlings and Van Eycks, the Rubens and the Brueghels. It all sickened her, she said. ‘If I can’t be a peer of the future, I won’t be a vassal of the past.’

She lived with depression, self-dislike, and the failure of love:

This time last year, what a lot there was to look forward to. And now … Across my life only one word will be written: ‘Waste’ – Waste of love, waste of talent, waste of enterprise …

She tried to write a novel but felt she had no talent:

I can only feel things. I can’t express them. I don’t know English well enough, I can’t analyse … But my chief handicap is that I cannot argue! I can only see my side of the question: I am blind to the other person’s …

In her despair she tried to keep her love for Vita alive. Without this life was too bleak to contemplate:

I love nothing in the world but you … not the slightest inflexion of your voice, not the subtlest nuance of your letters, escapes me … I got one yesterday that was cold, almost impersonal.

She still wanted to believe that, after Sonia’s marriage in November, they might go away together for ever. One morning she tried to talk a little to her mother about her feelings but did not get far. Mrs Keppel was ‘nice on the whole’. She made clear that it was the prospect of scandal more than the relationship itself that affronted her.

The day Violet returned from Holland she met Vita at Paddington. ‘It was like two flames leaping together,’ Vita said. They drove to the Dower House and spent ‘four absolutely unclouded days’. Violet then joined Denys in Brighton. They stayed at the Royal Crescent Hotel but did not speak to each other. She had ‘the most horrible kind of hallucination’ which she said she could not describe on paper. She visited Lady Sackville, who gossiped, which led to a ‘scene’ between Violet and her mother. ‘I know your mother will never ask me inside her house again,’ Violet wrote to Vita. ‘And I suppose the old antagonism will revive.’

Lady Sackville tried to come to terms with Vita’s unorthodox marriage:

she seems absolutely devoted to Harold, but there is nothing whatever sexual between them, which is strange in such a young and good-looking couple. She is not in the least jealous of H. and willingly allows him to relieve himself with anyone if such is his want or his fancy. They both openly said so one evening when I was staying at L. Barn and Reggie Cooper was there too. It shocked me.

And Reggie Cooper – a schoolfriend of Harold’s – confounded Violet’s tarnished fantasy of true escape after Sonia’s wedding when he told her of a statue Vita and Harold had bought for £300. ‘I know you wouldn’t dream of being so foolish as to spend £300 on a statue that you were never going to set eyes on,’ Violet wrote on 13 November:

How I wish I was Harold Nicolson! I envy him with every fibre of my body. He can be with you as much as he pleases. His words come back to me ‘I have always had everything I wanted’ – and I am